CES publishes guide to Monitoring and Evaluation on a Shoestring
Howard Lake | 18 February 2011 | News
Charities Evaluation Services’ National Performance Programme has published ‘Monitoring and Evaluation on a Shoestring’, a free guide for charities with limited budgets who want to develop their monitoring and evaluation approach and improve their effectiveness.
The need for charities and organisations to demonstrate the difference that they are making is only going to grow as funding pressures on the sector increase. While many third sector organisations do monitor and evaluate their work, CES believes that many of them are better at describing what
they do rather than the difference they make to people’s lives.
The new guide shows that evaluation does not have to be expensive and there is a lot that organisations can do themselves through self-evaluation.
Andy Gregg, Charities Evaluation Services Chief Executive, said: ‘Monitoring and evaluation are an integral part of a well-run charity and should be seen as vital tools in helping an organisation adapt and develop their services to meet need and improve efficiency. Dynamic, effective organisations put learning and development at the heart of their planning, and this free guide aims to help them to do so”.
The guide offers a simple but systematic approach to monitoring and evaluating. It can be used by trustees, staff and volunteers of third sector organisations. It will be particularly useful for those who have responsibility for self-evaluation and for using the information both internally and for reporting to funders and investors.
It includes ./guidance on getting ready to monitor and evaluate an organisation’s work, explains some common evaluation terms, helps organisations to identify the outputs and outcomes of their work, explores how to identify the data that organisations need to collect, provides good practice ./guidance in collecting data, describes some methods for collecting data and discusses how to use the data collected.
Charities Evaluation Services was established in 1990 and works with thousands of voluntary organisations and funders of all sizes each year, strengthening their abilities in performance management, evaluation and quality, to support them to do what they do best.
The publication is free to download at
www.ces-vol.org.uk/shoestring
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.